Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Marcus & Millichap, Inc.
Marcus & Millichap is a commercial real estate brokerage that helps owners and investors buy, sell, and finance properties like apartment buildings, shopping centers, and hotels.
Marcus & Millichap is a matchmaker for commercial real estate. It connects people who own buildings — apartment complexes, strip malls, self-storage facilities, hotels, offices — with people who want to buy them, and it collects a commission when a deal closes. That brokerage business is the heart of the company. It also runs a financing arm that helps buyers line up loans, and a research team that pumps out market data brokers and clients use to price deals. The customers are typically smaller and mid-sized investors and developers rather than giant institutions, and the company operates across the U.S. and Canada.
The business model is simple to describe but cyclical in practice. When property values are rising and interest rates are low, owners are eager to sell and buyers are eager to buy, so deals happen and commissions flow. When rates jump, as they did starting in 2022, the math on deals stops working, buyers and sellers disagree on price, and transaction volume dries up. That is exactly what happened to Marcus & Millichap: its revenue collapsed from roughly $1.4 billion in 2022 to well under half that in 2023 and 2024, and the company swung to losses. This is the ugly truth about brokerage — it is a toll booth on deal flow, and deal flow can vanish fast. What keeps the company standing during downturns is its size and its culture. Marcus & Millichap has one of the largest armies of investment sales brokers in North America, and it built its reputation on a training system that turns rookies into specialists who know a single property type in a single market cold. A broker who has sold apartment buildings in one metro for a decade knows the buyers personally, which is worth real money when a seller wants a clean, fast sale. The company also historically carried little debt, which let it survive slow years without panic. The main competition is other brokerage houses and, increasingly, the big publicly traded real estate services firms. CBRE Group, Jones Lang LaSalle, and Cushman & Wakefield all sell buildings, though they tilt toward larger institutional deals. Newer online marketplaces like Crexi have tried to digitize the listing process, though they have not replaced relationships the way some predicted.
One thing to watch: the company has been pushing to grow its financing business and its market share in the private-client segment, betting that when transaction volume eventually recovers, it will capture more of it. Whether that bet pays off depends on interest rates and the mood of small landlords — two things no brokerage controls.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026